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Coos Bay, OR – Southwestern Oregon Community College is pleased to welcome Dr. Scott Fisher, Director of Pine Mountain Observatory and physics faculty at the University of Oregon, to Southwestern on Wednesday May 16, 2018 at 7:00 pm in the Hales Center for the Performing Arts, 1988 Newmark Ave., Coos Bay. Dr. Fisher will present a lecture illustrating the wonders of our vast universe with visuals from observatories such as Hubble Space Telescope and Oregon’s own Pine Mountain Observatory. The goal of the lecture will be to connect everyone to the Universe we inhabit through the use of an easy-to-grasp scale that relates the actual size of the Universe to the audience.

Once we have our new perspective in mind, Dr. Fisher will move into a discussion of one of the most exciting recent discoveries in all of astronomy – the existence of Exo-planets. Exo-planets are planets that are known to orbit stars other than the Sun, as of late 2017 we have confirmed that over 3500 planets live outside our Solar System. Along the way our speaker will be very open to questions from the audience and is up for a round of "stump the astronomer" with anyone that attends the event.